Vice Versa
Vice versa was an exhibition marking the height of MAMBO's 60th-anniversary celebration, dedicated to its collection of over 5,000 artworks, largely built through donations. The show adopts a "the other way around" approach by focusing on recent acquisitions to rewrite the collection's history from a reversed perspective, proposing unusual conceptual connections and counterpoints. It brings together over 400 works from modern and contemporary artists—Colombian, Latin American, and international, including historically marginalized figures—to explore the museum as a living organism and the collection as an incomplete story.
The exhibition was structured around three fluid thematic axes: Memory, which uses analysis of the past as a critical tool for the present; Identity, which explores the uniqueness of the collection and its social context; and Dissonances, which introduces alternative visions to address social and political issues (such as race, gender, and identity) and challenge mainstream cultural narratives. Vice versa presents a critical rewriting process that deliberately adopts an a-systemic and anarchic ratio. Three special site-specific projects (ekphrasis) by artists Adriana Bustos, Giuseppe Stampone, and Juan Uribe are presented, offering divergent perspectives on the museum's mission and agency. The show seeks to transcend the rigid criteria of art history to configure MAMBO as a laboratory for imaginative research and production.